BioShockThe
BioShock Q&A on GameSpot talks with Irrational Games' Ken Levine about
the game being called the spiritual successor to the System Shock series:
"We're also really working on the artificial intelligence to get it to
'think,' because one of the coolest, and most challenging, things about this
game is all the interactions that AI [characters] can have, because of all
the relationships they have with each other. The more complex you make your
AI, and the more things you enable it to do, the more you have to make sure
it does those things well. And because it's so emergent, things happen all
the time that make us say, 'Whoa!' It's sometimes what we want, and
sometimes we end up in the Land of Weird Bugs. So, we're putting in a huge
amount of work into our AI...much more than on any other game we've ever
done. But it's definitely going to be worth it. "

American McGeeThe
American McGee Q&A part one and
part
two on Computer and Video Games talks with the producer/designer about
Bad Day L.A. and the state of gaming: "Puritanism related to sexual issues
is as rampant in the US as it's ever been. As for violence, the response is
as usual, lopsided and nonsensical. We have US politicians wasting time on
the non-issue of video game violence, while in the real world bombs are
dropped, villages are flattened, and entire countries are being destroyed. I
think the only way the situation will be improved is by the passage of time.
Politicians are generally a geriatric, old lot. Hence their retarded views
on the modern world. We just need to wait around a while and nature will do
its thing. Current politicians die, new generation of politicians come into
office. These new guys will focus on whatever happens to be the
'entertainment is evil' topic."

Marvel Ultimate AllianceThe
Marvel Ultimate Alliance Q&A on FiringSquad talks with Activision
producer Matthew Paul about Raven's upcoming superhero action game: "X-Men
Legends is a great franchise, but we wanted to do something fresh…hence
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Taking on the entire Marvel universe opened up a
bunch of possibilities that we hadn’t been able to do with previous games.
There’s just something so cool about teaming up your favorite Super Heroes
from all the different Marvel comics and setting off to fight evil. Plus,
just because we’ve created Marvel: Ultimate Alliance doesn’t mean that
there’s not a chance to revisit the X-Men Legends franchise some day."

Red vs. BlueBurnie
Burns of Red Vs Blue fame talks Machinima on HEXUS.gaming pulls some
Rooster Teeth: "Literally 2 Xboxs, 2 copies of whatever game it may be and
enough controllers for every cast member. We use letterboxing in Red Vs Blue
to cut out the radar that normally appears on the bottom left of the screen
and to hide the scores that appear at the top, giving the animation a movie
feel."

Thanks for the heads up. Still, I think this might be the first time in a long while that I give previews and interviews a miss. This game's the only one I'm really looking forward to, and the less I know about it going in the sweeter it will all be when it gets here.

As for McGee's comments on politics as a whole, it also applies to the sciences and pretty much any avenue of human activity that tends to become dominated by an established "old guard" of historically worthwhile contributors. It can be summarized as follows, with the appropriate words substituted where appropriate:

"The sciences advance one funeral at a time."This comment was edited on Aug 23, 01:04.

The toughest area to do that in is in aiming and shooting, because, obviously, pinpoint aiming with a mouse is easier than pinpoint aiming with a controller. So, there are some balance issues there that we're working on, but in terms of actually messing with [computer] screens, and messing with [hacking] machines, and making growth choices for your character, we're pretty much customizing that per platform.